


The Girl With The Diary

by the_crownless_queen



Series: girls like wolves [2]
Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, probably more shippy than intended, the religious thing is more there as a metaphor than anything else
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-11
Updated: 2017-05-11
Packaged: 2018-10-30 15:08:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10879353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_crownless_queen/pseuds/the_crownless_queen
Summary: As a child, Lucy loved hearing her mother tell her about Adam and Eve's fall from Eden.At first, she thought her mother was the tree, and the the apple, but no, she was the poisonous snake no one saw coming.





	The Girl With The Diary

**Author's Note:**

> So apparently the show's been cancelled and I will forever be bitter about that, but I love it and the characters too much to stop writing...  
> This is probably mostly non-sense, considering I had the idea around 2am while exhausted, and it took forever for me to write it in a way that left me satisfied with it, but now it's done.  
> Hope you enjoy :)

Lucy’s not religious. Really, she’s not. She thinks maybe her mother used to be, a long time ago—Lucy can hear it in the way she talks about History, sometimes—but she never made Lucy feel like she should be religious herself.

That doesn’t mean she doesn’t grow up with the stories. In between war stories and Greek mythology, her mother whispers to her about the Old Testament, about a world created in a week and paradises lost faster than that, of Caïn and Abel and the treachery of jealousy and wanting more than what you get.

It never fails to make her father roll his eyes at her mother—“raising little historians, aren’t you?”, he always says, but he never protests more than that.

_(some kids grow up hearing about princesses and white knights in shining armor; Lucy falls asleep to the story of Adam and Eve, and of the snake who closed the doors to Eden for all of mankind)_

_(for some reason, that story stays with her)_

**.x.**

As a child, Lucy is scared of storms. Amy is too, and so sometimes, when the wind howls too loud or thunder crashes too closely, they huddle together for the rest of the night, safe in the knowledge that they’re not alone in this—that no matter the storm, they can always make it a little less scary by facing it together.

Sometimes, their mother joins them and tells them stories until they fall back to sleep. Others, they join her, but most of the time, it’s just them: Amy and Lucy, two girls against a storm.

**.x.**

Lucy’s mother has a diary. It’s an old thing, its leather cover creaking in places and its pages always just that close to falling out, and she keeps it under lock and key in her office.

Lucy can count the number of times she saw that diary on her hands, but she can never forget the way the ink looked, sinuous and glossy on the bulging pages, tiny letters darkening pages that had grown yellow with age.

“It’s a family tradition,” her mother says when Lucy asks about it. “It helps keep our mind clear.”

Lucy nods along even though she doesn’t quite understand, and her mother smiles and ruffles her hair.

Amy says that the diary has to hold secrets, because “why else would Mum keep it hidden in her office?”. She tries to convince Lucy to take a peek, but they get caught before they can open the thing.

It’s the first time Lucy sees her mother truly mad, and by God she hopes it will be the only one.

**.x.**

When she’s eight, Lucy draws her mother a card for Mother’s Day. She does it every year, of course, but this year it’s special: it’s the first time she won’t be sharing it with Amy, the first year they’ve both decided to do one card each.

The image comes to her like in a dream, and as she traces it she wonders how she ever drew anything else. This, she thinks, represents her mother perfectly.

On the white card, a tall tree stands proudly, a red and golden apple hanging low from its branches, the only spot of color on the cover.

“It’s the tree of knowledge,” she explains when her mother asks. “With Eve’s apple,” she adds, even though she doesn’t think it should need clarification. She’s not sure why she put it there, but the tree looked almost naked without it.

_(what better way is there to represent this woman who teaches her everything she knows than with this?)_

Her mother smiles, and laughs and laughs, but she’s happy. Amy gives her own card next, and then they have cake. It is a truly lovely day.

**.x.**

Going into History—following in her mother’s footsteps—isn’t even a question. Lucy doesn’t think there was a day she thought about doing something else.

It makes Amy mad, she knows that. Her sister yells at her sometimes, asking her why Lucy can’t just pick something for herself for once.

Lucy never really answers, and she tries to pretend that it isn’t because she’s not sure how to answer to that.

She thinks Amy must know anyway, because she always looks sad when they stop arguing.

**.x.**

When her mother gets sick, Lucy doesn’t know what to do. It feels a little bit like the world is crumbling down on her, like the foundations of her being, which she had thought so solid until then, were actually built on unsteady terrain.

At first it’s not even that bad: shortness of breath and visible exhaustion, some headaches… Nothing that couldn’t be explained by the fact that Lucy’s mother never seems to want to stop working. But then she doesn’t get any better and the symptoms get worse, until finally she collapses one day and ends up at the hospital, where they tell Lucy that there really isn’t much they can do—that her mother’s body is killing itself.

They use hushed tones, like maybe if they keep their voices soft as they mention treatments they could try and what might happen next, the blow will be less harsh.

_(it really isn’t)_

Amy cries even harder than Lucy when she hears the news, and that night they sleep cuddled together in their mother’s bed like they did when they were kids.

Carolyn Preston comes back home on a Tuesday, and two years later they judge her too ill to leave it again. She is comfortable, Lucy knows, with the best care they can provide, but at the same time it is terrible, to see the proud and strong woman being brought so low by something she can’t truly fight.

_(once, she tells Amy she’d do anything to have their mother be healthy again. Amy just smiles sadly and says, “Me too.”)_

**.x.**

When Homeland recruits her to hunt down a time-travelling terrorist, Lucy isn’t quite sure what to think. She likes her team—Rufus is sweet and terrible at hiding his anxiety, but he comes anyway, and Wyatt not nearly as good as he thinks he is at pretending he isn’t broken up about something, but his heart’s in the right place—and she won’t deny that stepping out into the past is exhilarating and probably the craziest thing she’s ever done, but it is also so very dangerous.

Mason and Homeland tells them where to find Flynn and aim them at this target like they’re a weapon, and part of Lucy already knows that this won’t end well, that it can’t. How can it? All of them are like children, playing in a field that is bigger than them—History, Lucy knows, is bigger than all of them—and that field is made of quicksand: if they stop moving, they’ll sink and die, and Lucy’s terrified that they’ll trip up in the past and ruin everything.

But they have to go—have to chase this madman who thought the past was his to play with, his to terrorize.

They can’t let Flynn win without trying anything, not when they actually have a chance of stopping him, and so into the time machine Lucy goes.

**.x.**

It is so very easy to hate Flynn from the stories she’s told. _A murdered_ , they say, _a heartless monster, who’ll stop at nothing to make the world burn_ , and Lucy believed them.

Staring into the monster’s eyes, she still does, but…

But the monster knows her—knows her name, claims she’s the reason he even thought of doing this and that they’re on the same side, that she should join him and fight their true enemy—and he has her journal.

He is a madman and a terrorist and she hates him, but when she looks in his eyes they don’t look as crazy as she thought they would, and apparently future-her trusts him, which means she will trust him.

She isn’t quite sure she’s ready to face that fact, or that she will ever be.

**.x.**

Part of Lucy knows something went wrong the moment they step out of the Lifeboat. They did their best to preserve History, but they still changed things. The Hindenburg didn’t crash like it should have, and Lucy is afraid to find out the consequences of that.

Nothing prepares her for the elation of seeing her mother well again, or for the crushing heartbreak that follows when she finds out that she doesn’t have a sister—that apparently she (whoever this Lucy everyone seems to know is) never had a sister.

She doesn’t even care that she also has a _fiancé_ now—all that matters is that there’s a hole in her life and in her chest, and she’s the one who put it there, the one who took the knife and carved it, who hollowed out her own chest because she thought she could be more than what she had always been.

_(and isn’t that fucking ironic? Amy had always told her that she could be more, and look at what had happened this one time she had tried?)_

_(and the worst thing—the absolute worst thing—is that she cannot stop now: Flynn’s still out there and he has plans, and she—they—have to stop him before he succeeds, or worse, before she becomes the woman who’d fight with him)_

**.x.**

That night, she dreams of her childhood: of her mother’s soft voice as she told her stories to help her sleep, of her father’s mock-protests every time Lucy asked to be told just one more story, of Amy sneaking into her bed in the middle of the night, her freezing cold feet that she always pressed against Lucy’s warm legs because she knew Lucy hated that.

Lucy wakes up crying that morning, but when her mother asks if she slept well, Lucy lies and says she did.

And suddenly, almost out of nowhere, it hits her: she was wrong before. In fact, she was wrong all those times, all those years where she believed her mother was the tree in this story—full of knowledge and ever so steady.

No, her mother isn’t the tree—she’s the apple instead, temptation and knowledge and the promise of sin that you can’t help but ignore.

It feels like the worst trade-off in History: your mother for your sister, pick one and you can’t have the other, but the worst thing is that Lucy already knows what she’d choose and it isn’t this reality.

**.x.**

They meet Flynn again and again, chasing off after him but never getting close enough to do what they’re supposed to do, and part of Lucy is terribly glad for that even as she hates that it means he goes free every time.

_(it is terrifying, to realizing that she doesn’t want truly Flynn dead, even if that is their mission—well, Wyatt’s, at least—but not as much as it is to find out that Rittenhouse is real)_

**.x.**

Flynn won’t hurt her. She wishes it didn’t feel so much like losing.

**.x.**

Sometimes, Lucy can feel herself becoming the woman who’ll hand Flynn that journal, who’ll set him on his quest through time.

_(‘this is all your fault,’ seems to whisper every dead body Flynn leaves in his trail and it hurts a little more every time, and Lucy wonders what kind of woman she becomes that she’d do this to herself)_

“I hate this,” she tells Wyatt once, and she thinks she would love him for the way he always supports her if only he wasn’t so obviously still in love with his wife. Or maybe she already does—at this point, it’s a little hard to tell.

They will hate her, he and Rufus, once they find out that she’s been hiding this from them—the fact that she knows exactly why they can’t catch Flynn.

It’s not because they’re not good enough, not fast enough: it’s because Flynn has access to her notes and every thought, and knows what they’ll do before they even decide to do it. She wishes she knew exactly what was in that journal, but unless she starts writing it, she has no way to—and she refuses to do that.

“I hate this,” she repeats, and pretends that he understands that she’s talking about the way she’s not so sure they’re doing the right thing anymore—at least not always—instead of the way time travel weighs on them all.

_(who knows? Maybe he even does)_

**.x.**

It all ends so fast. It seems like one moment they’re following orders, going on about their business as usual, and the next they’re stealing the Lifeboat, running from Rittenhouse because everything went wrong.

But then everything goes right, or at least righter than things have been in so long Lucy isn’t sure she remembers what _normal_ feels like anymore.

_(what will her life be, she wonders, now that she has to go back to living it linearly?)_

She should have known this was only the calm before the storm, that it—this victory—had been too easy.

Only it hadn’t been easy, had it? They had all lost so much—so many people had died and suffered because of their actions or lack thereof… But still, she shouldn’t have let herself be fooled by the way things had seemed to end. It had all been too neat, she now knows, and stories only ended so neatly in books.

History—real History—was never quite so simple. She should have remembered that.

_(her mother had thought her that)_

Her mother smiles, kind and cold and oh so wrong, as she tells Lucy that everything she tried to do was for nothing—that she will never get Amy back, that they won’t _let her_ —that like the Hydra, the monster they thought they killed still lives, another branch fulfilling the wishes of the one they had stopped.

It’s a nightmare and Lucy wishes she would just wake up, but she knows she won’t. She’s not dreaming, she’s _awake_ , and god she doesn’t think this could get any worse.

_(which means that, of course, it will—even if she doesn’t know how yet)_

**.x.**

Here is the story of Eve the way her mother told it:

_Once upon a time, there was a woman, and her name was Eve. She and a man, Adam, lived in a garden God had provided for them, where they would have all they could ever want or need, should they but look for it._

_In return, God only asked for one thing: for them not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Of course, they said yes, and swore that they wouldn’t._

_But here was the twist: Adam, Eve and God weren’t the only ones to know of the Garden, of the Tree and the Apple it bore. There was a snake, and it was smart, and it was cunning. It knew how to wait for its time to come._

_And it did. Every day for months, the snake slithered in into the Garden, and it went to find Eve. It told her of the wonders of that Apple, of what eating it could bring her. But Eve was content, she was happy, and so she always said no._

_The snake didn’t relent. It tempted Eve, told her that the Apple was nothing she didn’t deserve. ‘Why,’ the snake asked her, ‘would have God planted this Tree there if He didn’t intend for you to harvest it?’_

_The snake knew it had Eve when her eyes lit up with understanding. ‘It is a test, then,’ Eve said, and the snake, laughing inside, hissed, ‘Yes.’_

_(it wasn’t even a lie, after all)_

_And Eve, who didn’t know then what treachery was, or that she had to expect it, ate the Apple and shared it with Adam, and God banished them for it._

**.x.**

Lucy had never been able to really understand that story before. She had thought she had—thought she had understood that it meant that sometimes, things weren’t fair or that you had to look beyond what you thought you knew—but she had been wrong.

God, she had been so wrong.

But she thinks she gets it a little better now. She feels like Eve, like this first woman must have felt after eating the fruit and realizing—suddenly knowing—that she had made a mistake, that she had been tricked, been betrayed, that the snake had always been her enemy and never her friend.

It burns in her stomach and her veins like acid, and it makes her sick. Her mother is there, standing in front of her with her hands open and her eyes proud, this woman who raised her (only no, that’s not the woman who raised her, is it, because Lucy changed the timeline and now she’s the only one to carry all those memories she has of them) and whom Lucy loves is speaking in that entranced tone that means she believes in what she’s saying, and Lucy doesn’t know her.

It is torture, to wonder if this woman before her is a stranger, created by an alternate timeline, or if this is who her mother always was, and Lucy simply never saw it before.

It is torture, not knowing if she ever knew her mother at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Does anyone else have feeling about the way Lucy basically remembers an entirely different life than everyone else? Because as far as we can see, Wyatt's and Rufus' didn't change much, but Lucy's entire childhood changed (and not just because she lost her sister, though oviously that's a big part of it), and I honestly don't know how she, or anyone, could deal with that.
> 
> On another note, I'm not religious but I did read the Old Testament and some of the Bible at some point... If any of this offends anyone, I'm sorry and it wasn't my intention, but I tried not to make it actually religious though the theme may have sort of seeped in anyway...


End file.
